One of the best parts about working to make the world a greener place is the opportunity to learn from others that share our vision. This week, we spoke with Mary Rose and Karl Ostrom – executive directors at the Network for Business Innovation and Sustainability (NBIS) of Seattle, Washington – about its latest ventures in sustainability.

Mary and Karl founded NBIS in 2003 with a mission of guiding regional businesses, across sectors and industries, towards best practices that create healthy ecosystems and prosperous communities through the power of business. Over the past year alone, NBIS has made a significant difference.

NBIS’ By-Product Synergy NW, is a long-running initiative bringing companies together to reuse and repurpose waste into new products. In conjunction with this, NBIS has developed an online portal, the Materials Innovation Exchange, which provides users an outlet to sell, buy, trade or donate a variety of products ranging from heavy-duty industrial equipment and chemicals to fabrics, plastic and wood. The Materials Innovation Exchange helps turn waste to revenue by showcasing innovative reuse strategies for unneeded materials.

Mary Rose, co-director, NBIS: nbis.org

“We’ve been working with business leaders on new strategies for accelerating sustainability to reduce impact,” said Mary. A recent whitepaper by Karl, New Challenges Reshaping Corporate Social Responsibility, highlights the importance of this work and urges all businesses to incorporate visionary benchmarks of environmentally and socially responsible business performance into their frameworks.

“The goal is to illustrate the need for more aggressive sustainability leadership to move beyond incrementalism. We aren’t going fast enough and we’re not having the impact that the planet needs,” Mary continued.

Leading responsible businesses doesn’t come without its challenges. Mary stated the need for collective and collaborative strategies to break down common barriers, such as the: “race to the bottom – the pressure for lower prices, lower wages, and all the pressures that keep companies from taking full responsibility for their impacts.”

Karl shed light on the damaging anti-regulatory mindset of many companies, “They need regulation to level the playing field when it comes to getting rid of toxic chemicals or lowering carbon footprints in supply chains. They really need to learn to work together to lobby government for policies that make sustainability the profitable thing to do. Instead of rewarding the people that externalize environmental and social impacts, the marketplace uniformly needs to allow everybody to do the right thing without reducing their own competitive advantage. Everybody can win, but it requires a different mindset.”

NBIS advice? Build strong relationships, learn from each other and showcase sustainable success. Developing business coalitions to address challenges collectively is the foundation for innovative, win-win solutions.

We spend a lot of time on our blog, and we’re so grateful that you do too – that’s why we never let a week go by without your feedback. Our weekly blog polls help us learn more about our readers, our industries and common misconceptions surrounding sustainability.

Our furniture asset management services provide an eco-friendly alternative to purchasing new assets in the government, higher education and hospitality sectors. We’re proud to increase the green credentials of the establishments we work in, but can’t help but wonder if there’s truly enough being done to go green across the board.

Throughout the last few weeks we asked our readers if they feel the higher education and hospitality industries are incorporating environmental principles into core objectives. The results are in:

When it comes to the hospitality industry, 50% of those polled feel as though hoteliers are as green as can be while 25% feel they could be doing a bit more. The remaining 25% feel as though the industry isn’t doing its part at all.

Want to weigh in? Come back and visit us on Wednesday, August 19 to let us know if you think the government sector is doing its part.

Have an idea for a The Refinishing Touch blog poll? Tell us your questions on Twitter at @RefinishTouch.

Today is Earth Day, one of our favorite holidays here at The Refinishing Touch. Each year we take time out of our busy schedules to consider all of the ways the natural environment helps sustain our work – and how we can help sustain the environment.

As a reader of this blog, you might already know that we take the environment seriously – especially when it comes to furniture asset management within government edifices, universities and hotels. We wrote a guest blog for The Professional Housing Management Association, which described three ways you can be an advocate for sustainability in the built environment by becoming a green building champion.

Ted Bardacke made a great point in his interview with UCLA Today when he stepped on as Deputy Director of the new LA Office of Sustainability. During the Q&A, he said that our economic future rests in developing and serving the markets of tomorrow, which can’t ignore the importance of the environment.

After a busy summer season of preparing dormitories and campus centers across the US and Canada for the influx of students come fall, The Refinishing Touch crew had sustainability on the brain. So, as you may have guessed, we took to our weekly polls to see if our readers were on the same page.

This upcoming Monday, the world will celebrate Earth Day for the 43rd time. The Refinishing Touch is dedicated to preserving the world’s resources year-round, but we welcome this day of environmental celebration and sustainable awareness with open arms.

The first annual Earth Day took place in 1970, and boasted participation from nearly 20 million people. Next week, it is projected that an astounding one billion people, across 180 different countries, will join together to commemorate the special day and make a difference to the environment we all share.

Our premier clientele, which include hotels, college dormitories, on-base army barracks and more, possess the ability to make impactful changes. Our world’s environment greatly depends on the act of not only individuals, but organizations at large. Whether you’re in a position of power at a global corporation, or simply trying to increase environmental awareness in your own home, here are a few reasons to go green on Earth Day and for years to come:

– The amount of wood and paper thrown away each year is enough to heat 50 million homes for two years. To cut down on such environmentally-hazardous routines, increase the amount of recycling bins in your edifice and repurpose existing assets whenever possible.

– Recycling a newspaper each day would save about 250 million trees each year, yet only 27 percent on Americans currently recycle the daily read.

– An individual goes through seven trees each year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees.

After 35 years of delivering cost-effective, sustainable furniture asset management services within the hospitality, higher education and government sectors, we’ve taken pride in the amount of reduced greenhouse gas emissions and preserved landfill space resulting from repurposing furniture assets. From our studies, The Refinishing Touch estimates it has saved approximately 2,250,000 pounds of wood from making its way into landfills nationwide since our inception in 1977.

If you would like to learn more about The Refinishing Touch’s fiscally-responsible and environmentally-friendly refinishing, re-upholstery and remanufacturing solutions, visit our website or request a free quote here.

Here at The Refinishing Touch, we have worked diligently over the past 35 years to showcase our commitment to reducing harmful landfill waste. Because of this, we are always pleased to see initiatives by others come to fruition and make an impact.

The project’s overall goal is to cut greenhouse gas emissions from trash disposal, and ease the amount of waste making its way into Massachusetts landfills. As part of the plan, businesses and residents are required to improve recycling habits, to ensure fewer toxic materials and other banned substances end up in the state’s waste stream. Commercial food waste from restaurants, hotels and other businesses in hospitality would also be forced to adapt to new waste methods and mandates.

While some claim the plan is controversial, we couldn’t help but support a project that strives towards the same cause as our company – environmental preservation. By refinishing, re-upholstering and remanufacturing existing furniture assets, The Refinishing Touch has prevented approximately 2,250,000 pounds of wood from making its way into the nation’s landfill, since our inception in 1977. Recently, we completed an armoire conversion renovation at the Best Western Fort Walton Beach Hotel, in Florida, that produced zero landfill waste – an aspiration more hotels should strive towards.

In addition to information submitted by resorts, ranks were determined based on information compiled from various web sites and public documents pertaining to 35 criteria points across four categories, and evaluated based on ski areas’ environmental practices, including environmental policies and regulations, addressing climate change, habitat protection, and watershed protection.

Through the utilization of The Refinishing Touch’s furniture refinishing services, our customers have been able to undergo major construction and renovation projects whilst simultaneously reducing their carbon emissions as much as 90%. Instead of buying new, organizations can refinish, refurbish, or reupholster existing furniture with non-toxic, low VOC lacquers – eliminating harmful landfill waste, carbon impact, and negative effects to surrounding air, trees, water and communities.

Although we were disappointed to see poor results from resorts such as the Arizona Snowbowl – that have reportedly begun making snow with 100% sewage effluent – the overall ski industry’s improvement in just a year’s time is encouraging. We hope these results will serve to inspire even more resorts in the years to come.

Recently, we’ve seen local, state and federal government bodies across the nation taking small steps to gradually become more sustainable, cost-effective facilities. Perhaps one of the most noteworthy goals that we’ve blogged about before is the Obama Administration’s push for federal government agencies to become completely paperless by the end of 2019.

The majority(40 percent) of readers agreed with the government’s long-term goal to go paperless, stating that printed paper documents can easily be replaced due to the rise in tablets, smartphones and other technology.

Other options, such as eliminating the need to buy new furniture by up-cycling existing assets, replacing mercury bulbs with more efficient lighting, and reducing the use of personal transportation, were also popular choices among voters, with all three coming in at a close second place.

Here at The Refinishing Touch, we support any initiative that simultaneously preserves a business owner’s budget and the environment. Many local, state and federal governments are showing progress in both its short- and long-term environmental goals, and we are proud to be a part of its shift towards increased sustainability.

For more information on our renovation work completed in The White House and other government facilities, please click here. To contribute to our weekly polls, be sure to visit our blog page where a new question is posted every week.

Good green policies resonate in both the public and private sectors as making sense from both fiscal and ecological standpoints. As they should — we all have to share the planet and will ultimately benefit from sound environmental practices.

Green government purchasing programs have been found to positively impact not only taxpayers’ wallets, but also employee safety and environmental concerns.

There’s data to back this up. One of the study’s findings, detailed in the working paper by Timothy Simcoe and Michael W. Toffel, states, “Cities with green building policies targeting only municipal buildings had nearly twice as many private-sector green buildings by 2008 as did other cities of similar size, demographics, and environmental preferences.”

We believe this trend of private sector following public sector when it comes to environmentally sound solutions – especially in building and renovating – is a value add for all concerned. If a public entity shows how green procurement is done, it sets a financial and environmental example for private companies to follow, strengthening efforts that ultimately benefit us all and put government in a true green leadership role.